


The Perennial Lily

by dornishsphinx



Category: Arthurian Mythology, Arthurian Mythology & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mythology References, Post-Canon, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Trick or Treat: Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:35:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26956678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dornishsphinx/pseuds/dornishsphinx
Summary: The golden age is ended. And still, time flows on, like the river past Castle Astolat.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	The Perennial Lily

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lalagant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lalagant/gifts).



> Hello, Happy Hallowe'en, and I hope you enjoy this piece, Lalagant! (Alternate title: "The best revenge is living well while everyone else is dead or have ruined reputations.")

Elaine realises that she’s been mistaken for the daughter of the King of Corbenic ten minutes into her conversation with the lord of such and such, when he laments the passing of her valiant, godly son, gone too soon like the rest of them. He pats her shoulder and weeps for the passing of the age of chivalry; that those who survive must surely be damned, that they must serve a man whose reign began with the murder of Mordred’s sons before God’s altar, or disperse to the four corners of the earth. 

Elaine of Astolat has no sons or daughters. She has never had a lover or husband to give them to her. The Lady of Corbenic, on the other hand, gave the world the greatest knight who has ever lived, who surpassed both his sires. Who is the Lady of Astolat, hidden in her castle’s shadows until she made a scene of herself, never having known requited love before or since, to that? 

She supposes, to be fair, that the Lady of Corbenic might have been equally offended when the good lord made sly jabs at her bathing habits and experiences with the greatest knight in the realm, turned second-greatest, turned monk, turned whatever Sir Lancelot of the Lake has decided his repentance must take the form of now. 

(He had ever been comfortable slipping into the colours of others those weeks she knew him; perhaps it’s not a surprise that he’s adapted unrecognisably into these new times.)

She wouldn’t know, though. They’ve never met, she and the woman that Lancelot chose to live with as man and wife, while he offered Elaine nothing but platitudes and money for her tender care, refusing to wear her token in anything other than disguise. She still doesn’t know what made her so different from that other woman, and from the Queen most of all, but she supposes that she doesn’t know either of them. She didn’t know Lancelot of the Lake so very well either, outside the stories of his valiant deeds and chivalry and the vulnerable beauty of his injured form. What was once humiliation and misery has softened into indifference; there are days—indeed, weeks—where she forgets his face. 

There was a time when she wished to die of heartbreak over him, before the King, who everyone still calls  _ the King _ , and not  _ the former king  _ because of what a shadow he casts over Constantine, was slain, along with the majority of his shining beacons of chivalry. She lost her father and brothers to the bloody end of the golden age. There are other relationships to mourn, relationships that mattered more than an unrequited love.

So, it’s with a cool and composed face that she asks the lord if he indeed has a heart, to tell a mother that she should be glad her son is dead, and begs tiredness before he can respond. She leaves his castle, riding back to where her ship is moored on the great, winding river to Camelot with a retinue of her father’s knights. It is the same as it has always been, flowing from the north past the Castle Astolat and down and down and down. It meets the sea somewhere; she has never gone so far. 

(Perhaps one day, when she is truly done with the shadows of grief that spiderweb her heart, she’ll think  _ my knights _ without a second thought, rather than biting her tongue bitterly on the sound. Perhaps that day will be sooner than she, with her newly thrice-broken heart, can imagine.)

The Lady of Astolat, as it turns out in the end, is the last of the noble house of Astolat, and the world moves forward like the current. Some drift with it into the uncertain future; some old rocks and pillars remain steadfastly stuck until they erode into silt and sand, clinging to the promise of a golden age that has passed, awaiting a return to which they will never bear witness. 

She would not speak for her father, nor her brothers, but she is the only one who remains. She knows what it is to attempt to stall herself in time and the court’s memory, yet she knows what it is to give herself to the river’s flow. 

This, but that. That, yet also this. It is well past time to choose one or the other.

So, she does. 

Elaine boards her ship under her own power, this time, rather than her limp body being arranged and laid down gently by her weeping brothers, overseen by her father with his grave, heartbroken face. The ship is a great and stately vessel rather than the simple coracle she requested of them, to heighten her pure, untouched, pitiable maiden’s beauty. 

They will have forgotten that image. The land and its lords have impure, violated, glorious Camelot, who even the Grail and Elaine of Corbenic’s heaven-blessed son could not save, to mourn instead.

Her dress and hair catch on the wind, bringing her thoughts to the present. She commands the men to set forth, coming to the prow and looking into the ever-changing water. She imagines the flickers of white sunlight and froth from her men’s oars as the ghosts of shadow-sick Estrildis and Hafren; Dahut lamenting her foolishness; the Lady of the Lake caressing her stolen, beautiful son, that bringer of ruin and glory; the May-children testifying to all the sins that sprang forth from and doomed King Arthur’s Camelot. Them, and so many others, and her younger self, clutching lilies to her heartbroken chest, the ink from a foolish, impassioned plea for a man who barely knew her to remember her death for love of him, curling off into the water. She disappears too, in the flow of the water; there for a glittering instant and then gone. 

The ship sails the river down to a Camelot empty of those who saw her come once before. The future, whatever it is, beckons. The House of Astolat goes to meet it. 


End file.
